[pianotech] cleaning/restoring tone of bass strings

[Ed Sutton]

Bruce-
You are correct that it takes more than one Dremel brush to do a full set of strings. Since Shawn was only concerned about 4 strings, it seemed unnecessary to mention it. I used the steel wire brush and used about 4 of them to do a full set of strings. The cup shaped brush works as well as the round brush.
Ed Sutton
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bruce Dornfeld 
  To: pianotech 
  Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 11:24 PM
  Subject: Re: [pianotech] cleaning/restoring tone of bass strings



  The method of brushing bass strings that has been mentioned needs a bit more explanation.  The tip of Bill Bremmer that was in the Journal about a half a year ago was a bit misleading.  The photo that was used showed a Dremel tool with a brush as Ed mentioned.  When I tried this on a piano last summer, the brass brush in the Dremel tool lasted about two strings before it wore down to being not much more than a cutting edge.  I emailed Bill Bremmer about it and he said that he uses a full sized drill with a brass brush about four to six inches diameter.  He has done this many times with good results.  I did use this on one piano, but I also reattached a loose bass bridge at the same time.  So this did not tell me how much the brushing helped.  It did make things look much better and I do believe the sound was improved by it.  The big drill will make it harder to get to some places because of plate struts or keybed clearance.  It might make it harder to get to just a few unisons too.

  Bass guitarists will sometimes take off their strings and boil them in hot water to clean them up.  Then they put them back on and they sound better.  If you thought that the bad sound from these strings was from beer or soda splashing on them, or some similar contamination, this kind of approach might work.

  It might be best to start with the standard procedures.  First, of adding some twist in the direction of the winding, which is real quick to do.  If that does not help enough removing the string from the hitch pin and rolling a loop up and down a few times can only help.  If none of this helps, I think the studio owner will see that new strings are in order. 


  Bruce Dornfeld, RPT
  North Shore Chapter
  bdornfeld at earthlink.net

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